System requirements on ultra settings nowadays

Obscura

Hey guys. I just bought a new computer and I tried out some of the newer games, and i got very surprised about how they perform on a 2k $ computer...
its an i7 6700 with 2x gtx 970 a 32gb ram
First example was gta 5. I can easily set the graphics so use more than 4 gb video memory, and to get like 25-40 fps.
Another example was Rise of the Tomb Raider that I just bought yesterday. First I've set everything to max settings, but then even in the first scene, i got horrible performance, like 20 fps. I played around with some anti aliasing settings, and i managed to get a good balance between anti-aliasing and good performance. Now i get between 30 and 60 fps but with the lowest anti-aliasing settings, and everything else is on ultra. The game looks super nice though, I'm really impressed. I would like to point out that this game supports SLI so it means that it produced this speed using 2 cards...

I tried out some other newer games as wellm like the demo of Doom, Far Cry Primal, but these were running flawlessly.

However, I would like to ask if these are normal, and if I should expect this level of system requirements for the near future?

PolyHertz

The Geforce 970 is well known to have performance issues if you go over 3.5gb of vram usage, which could very well happen when putting settings to the max in modern games.

Obscura

I was googl-ing about this Tomb Raider performance thing, and based on the comments , its the same on some other, better cards. I don't know how much of this is the truth of this though.

Anyways,  the most of the users has 2 gb of video memory, some players has even less. I know they should update, but my question is, 4 gb going to be the standard soon? And should developers aim that? Also lets say its the standard or will become soon. Then how about the next gen games that are planned to come out in like 2-3 years? Will they require like 6-8 gb of video memory?

PolyHertz

Well, the Geforce 1070 and 1080 just launched with 8gb of vram, the 1060 is rumored to have 6gb of vram, and even the current consoles have about 5gb of usable ram.

Its fine to target 8gb vram, just make sure your minimum spec doesn't require anywhere near that so that you can capture as wide of audience as possible.

Obscura

Yeah. As far as my understanding goes, textures are the most video memory consuming resource in game, and I remember 4k was a big no-no a few years ago, unless it was really necessary for some reason. Nowadays Its used here and there sometimes, but most of things are still clearly not 4k and rather done with some detail textures/splat materials. Is the insane system requirement coming mostly from higher resolution textures? Or? Because was examining some materials in these games, and they are not that complex, they don't do much wizardry. Another thing that I noticed in GTA is that the video memory usage can highly depend on the anti-aliasing setting. I thought thats a screen space effect, and it only uses copies of the frame buffer result. How that can cause much higher video memory usage?

Also there is FXAA and TAA (temporal) in Unreal Engine, and in a few of the new games. I tested both at work, and TAA seems to give so much better performance than FXAA and it also gives much higher quality anti-aliasing at the most of cases. But the most of the games doesn't have temporal AA as an option. Why don't they put it into more games? I think it could be a significant optimization. Alongside with adaptive resolution scale.

kolayamit

GTX 1080 should run any games at max settings until 1080ti comes out